anti-Semitism

A university problem?
Bill Clinton once said he smoked cannabis but did not inhale, but who believed this? Clinton did seem to struggle with that heady mix of truth and logic on a number of occasions. He is not alone with this problem. We are told that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the UK. We are also told it is possible to be anti-Israel but this does not amount to being anti-Semitic. Once again this is hard to credit, for a number of reasons, not least being the people who say this. As they, like Clinton, are not very convincing. To be against a country but not its people sounds like Clintonism on a grand scale. After all what is a country without its people? And it's not good enough to do the relabel trick popular with the Left, to substitute the word Zionism for Israel. As if to make it seem like an abstract concept rather than a real place. This is a sleight that fools nobody but speaks volumes about those who would try such a thing.

So where do we find this rising tide? All sorts of places, but the Labour Party and universities are something of a treasure trove and there is an entwining of these two. As there is between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. This happens because the Left have pulled another moral equivalence stunt, they lump these two things together. This is wrong. In so many words they say you get anti-Semitism because you have Islamophobia.

The UCU the union for university lecturers has toyed with anti-semitic motions for several years, namely a total boycott of Israeli universities and other institutions. They were only prevented from passing this because their legal advisers said this would be against the law.

Five soldiers, aged 19, from the Israeli Defence Force had been due to perform a medley of national songs at the Bloomsbury Theatre as part of a sell-out family show to celebrate their country's 61st anniversary. But the show has been shelved after the venue, owned by University College London, claimed the content was "political". See here.

In a review of the book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey by Mary Lefkowitz the reviewer Michael Burleigh starts his article with the following sentences

For several decades, universities on both sides of the Atlantic have not been pleasant places to work. Since the 1960s, humanities and social science faculties have been the last redoubt of the Left, whether in its Marxist totalitarian or post-modernist, multicultural incarnations. Academics have been allowed to have their way in opposing a stifling political correctness.